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Welcome to DBSTalk. Our community covers all aspects of video delivery solutions including: Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS), Cable Television, and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). We also have forums to discuss popular television programs, home theater equipment, and internet streaming service providers. Members of our community include experts who can help you solve technical problems, industry professionals, company representatives, and novices who are here to learn.

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H.265 is far from ready for prime time..H.264 provides superior results, from what i've seen to date. Was kind of bummed about it, actually. H.264 has been around a long time though..not sure if or when 4k will be available via sat. If wanting UHD/4K now, Sony will stream if willing to join their service (aka proprietary), and get the right equipment.

As was said earlier, we haven't even completed the transition from SD to HD yet. I think the current state of 3D foreshadows the uphill climb that 4K has ahead of it. There is a lot of support for it among the groups of people who take the time to join an internet forum dedicated to a satellite TV service or to AV equipment discussions, but you have to keep in mind that we here or the folks at somewhere like AVS are a very very small minority when it comes to the customer base of DirecTV. There aren't a lot of 4K TVs out there, the general public has no idea what it is, plus there's a lack of content even to fill a channel. Plus, bandwidth is an issue not only on the service provider (DirecTV) side, but on the distribution side. There's not an unlimited amount of satellite space for channels to send their signals to cable/satellite companies and moving to 4K would put a strain on that to be sure. I'm sure many content providers are still using older MPEG-2 systems to distribute.

I see it, for a good long time, being a niche that is served by a couple of PPV channels and perhaps one or two linear movie or event channels. If you're expecting every day channels like Discovery or USA, or heck even the normal HBO feed to switch to 4K, you may be waiting a while. It wouldn't require new dishes, LNBs, or satellites in space, but it would certainly need new receivers and TVs.

How does that work? I thought bitrate and bandwidth were inextricably tied together.

I think maybe he misspoke. By "bitrate" maybe he meant resolution/picture quality. Bitrate and bandwidth are exactly the same thing.

It looks like you think bit rate doesn't mean the same thing as "Mb/s for the video". It does. The abbreviation "Mb" stands for megabits, after all, and the "/s" is a rate of the number of such bits per second

If you have a video and compress it with MPEG4/h.264 and HEVC/h.265 the file size for the latter will be about half as much. That means the bit rate is about half as much to stream it.